


Breathing Through the Pain

by Niki



Category: Mass Effect, NCIS
Genre: AU, AU: Space, Batarian Slavers - Freeform, M/M, Mindoir, Panic Attacks, Trope Bingo Round 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 10:49:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1547957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niki/pseuds/Niki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Normandy is tasked with transporting a pair of criminal investigators to Eden Prime.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathing Through the Pain

**Author's Note:**

> AU with no Saren, no Reapers... at least as far as our heroes know. And I gave the Normandy a few additional rooms. For Hurt/Comfort bingo April challenge. Also for Trope Bingo square: AU: Space
> 
> This might be the first "proper" crossover I've ever written. Also, I seem to be unable to write anything but AUs for NCIS.

2183 CE

Tony DiNozzo fidgeted on his seat in the dock yard, feeling like a little kid. They were about to get on board the Normandy, which was the newest and shiniest ship in the Systems Alliance fleet, co-developed with the turians. Their team was usually Earth-bound, ships and colonies had their own investigative teams but now something big enough was going on that director Shepard had decided to sent the Major Crimes Response Team out into space. 

Tony had transferred to ACIS from C-Sec four years ago, largely because of the man sitting next to him, shooting him half annoyed, half amused glances as he fidgeted. Leroy Jethro Gibbs, a veteran of the first contact war, a marine sniper and a damn good investigator. They'd met when Gibbs had been undercover on the Citadel, Tony had arrested him and before he knew... Well, he had been losing faith with the system because the higher ups kept hushing up the incompetence and downright criminal activity of Harkin's and Gibbs had shown up to poach him just at the time when he thought returning to Earth – or at least human controlled space – sounded like a good idea.

“It's here,” Tony said, springing up from his seat.

“She, DiNozzo. Ships are called 'she',” Gibbs reminded him with a straight face but Tony knew him well enough to detect a hint of a smile in his eyes. It made him want to smirk – Gibbs was excited himself. It had to be awhile since he'd been aboard a ship as well.

The docking procedures seemed to take ages, but in the end they were escorted into the ship by an excited-looking young marine. The officer meeting them by the doors was a handsome, tall man, in his thirties maybe? He had close-cropped dark hair and piercing blue eyes, with a long scar running over the lower part of his face, dissecting his upper lip. It didn't detract from his looks, though, which Tony was interested to note. Not that he was going to start anything on a ship but it wasn't like his persistent crush on Gibbs was ever going to lead to anything. 

The man took a step towards Gibbs, and opened his mouth.

“Welcome aboard the Normandy, I'm Commander Shepard, and you must be... Gibbs?”

The man came to a halt when he saw Gibbs' face, and Tony almost collided into Gibbs because his boss came to a standstill as well. 

“Johnnie.”

\- - -

“I'm sorry, Commander,” Gibbs corrected himself but the man was shaking his head. 

“Gibbs, it's been... damn, almost two decades. You're ACIS now?”

“Lead the MCRT in the Vancouver office, yeah. And you're a commander.”

Johnnie looked bashful and glanced down, much like the boy he had once been.

“Yeah. I... well, I should take you to Anderson. He says you used to serve together? But I guess I never made the connection with the name.”

“When we were younger than you and Agent DiNozzo here,” Gibbs replied to his question. He hadn't seen Anderson in, damn, over a decade. 

“Tony DiNozzo,” Tony said, offering his hand to shake. They were civilians, after all, and Tony wasn't one to stand on ceremony. 

“John Shepard,” Johnnie replied, and smiled, looking so much like his father at that moment that Gibbs had to start walking just to get rid of the memories before they moved into dangerous territory. 

Anderson looked just like he had looked back when they served together in the First Contact war, and Gibbs soon lost himself in the reminiscing, noting absently that Tony seemed to be grilling the poor Commander. It didn't take a skilled investigator to figure out about what. Tony had a habit of ferreting out everyone's secrets and Gibbs resigned himself to losing some of his.

\- - -

“So how do you know Gibbs?” the younger agent, DiNozzo, asked Shepard.

Shepard glanced to where Gibbs was talking with Captain Anderson and shrugged mentally. 

“Our families were neighbours in the colony.”

“When did Gibbs live in a colony?” DiNozzo asked, frowning. “Which colony?”

Shepard accepted a datapad from Lieutenant Alenko and saw the biotic attempting to catch the eye of the ACIS agent to make him stop the line of questioning. Trust Alenko to try and keep unpleasant subjects from rising. 

“Mindoir,” Shepard said, and couldn't help but meet Alenko's eyes to bask in the sympathy that shone there, never spoken. 

“Mindoir, but... oh hell.” DiNozzo was looking at his boss with an expression of sadness and horror, and yeah. 

“Yeah,” Shepard said. 

“Was he... was he there?” DiNozzo asked, as if he couldn't stop himself. Everyone knew what Mindoir meant, what it stood for. 

“No,” Shepard said, determined to not say more. It wasn't his story to tell. 

“Wait, you said family...”

“Uh-huh. Lieutenant Alenko will show you where you can stow your stuff,” Shepard said, deciding he was not running away, he was performing a strategic retreat. 

\- - -

Kaidan wasn't really surprised to see Shepard ducking into a storage room for a spot of privacy when he returned from guiding Agent DiNozzo, but when the man hadn't come out in ten minutes (not like Kaidan was keeping track on the commander's location all through the day, but he was working right next to the spot and it wasn't like the man was hard to miss and...), he decided he urgently needed a new part from said storage room. 

He palmed the door lock and was surprised to see the room empty – maybe he _had_ missed the man. No, wait, there was someone crouching behind one of the shelves. Shepard's eyes were closed like in pain, he was clutching at his uniform shirt on the left side of his chest, right on top of his heart, and his breathing was laboured. He looked like he was having a heart attack and Kaidan almost called for doctor Chakwas until he made the connection. 

He knew what was going on, knew why Shepard had headed for the privacy of the storage room instead of the med bay, and he was on his knees in front of the man in seconds. 

“You're not dying,” he said, reaching for the Commander's hand. 

He didn't care if the other man thought the touch too intimate, human touch was imperative at the moment. Shepard clutched his hand in his own with desperate strength, and the pain in his eyes as he opened them to meet his gaze was heart-stopping. 

“I know,” he said, tiredly. “Just... waiting for it to pass.”

“Breathe with me,” Kaidan instructed, slowing his own breathing for Shepard to match. “In – hold – out – hold – in...” he kept repeating the instructions with the authority of medical personnel. He only had the brief field medic training but it was enough for a panic attack. 

“It's not bad,” Shepard said in between breaths. “Just... haven't had an attack in years.”

Of course. That would explain why there wasn't a mention of it in his medical files (to which Kaidan was privy due to his training and responsibility of the team in the field). He had a pretty good guess as to the trigger too but he wasn't going to make the memories worse by mentioning any names. 

“But seeing Gibbs, suddenly I was back on Mindoir.” 

Well, if the man was going to go there himself... “Do you want to talk through it? Or do you want me to distract you?” He could babble about ship's rumours or training roster until the next morning if that was what it took. Or even about his own memories of Camp Zero, anything to keep Shepard grounded.

“We were neighbours. Me, my parents, Gibbs, his wife and little girl. Kelly, that was her name. She was eight. I never much cared for the younger kids but she was... she was such a sweetheart. I used to play with her when Mrs Gibbs had to go somewhere. Gibbs was off-world a lot, a marine. I used to idolise him so much, wanted to become a marine like him – not a farmer like my dad. I didn't want to stay on Mindoir. I wanted out, so bad...”

His voice trailed off, weak as it was, and they concentrated on breathing for a moment. Kaidan sat down on the floor next to him, still holding on to his hand, anchoring him into reality and current time. He didn't even think about the fact he was _holding Shepard's hand_ , at least not much, because the hand was clammy, shaking, unlike what he'd pictured in his maybe-not-so-rare daydreams about touching the man in a not-medical-emergency kind of way. 

“We were in their front yard when the batarians came,” Shepard said, even quieter than before. “I told her to run, and Mrs Gibbs told me to run, and then I heard screaming, oh god, I think it was my mother, I always thought it was my mother, and...”

He was crying now, and Kaidan wished he had hacked the lock on the door so that no one could get in to witness the scene. No one needed to see their commander like this, and Shepard didn't need the added stress of being seen. And Kaidan wanted this moment, these revelations, as much as he wished Shepard would never have had to go through it, wasn't forced to reveal all of this to him in a situation like this. 

“When the Alliance troops arrived, they thought I was dead, too. There was so much blood on me. Hers, mine,” he said, raising his free hand to run over the scar on his face with shaking fingers. “And the more I learnt about batarians, the happier I was that she was dead, that they were dead.”

Silent tears run down his cheeks, almost unnoticed by the man himself and Kaidan ached to wipe them away. 

“I was happy his family was dead,” Shepard choked out. “And this is the first time I've seen him since.”

“He wouldn't blame you,” Kaidan said, quietly. No sane person would – death was preferable to what the batarians did to their slaves. Everyone in the Alliance had seen rescued slaves and slaver camps at one point or another – Kaidan was sure their missions were rotated to make damn sure everyone did, so that they would know what they were fighting for in the Terminus systems. 

“I suffered from panic attacks, after. Nightmares, too. They went away.”

His colour was better, breathing even and slow, and he wasn't sweating anymore, but when Kaidan made as if to let go of his hand Shepard tightened his grip. 

“Sorry,” he said, meeting Kaidan's eyes. “Sorry to dump this on you, but... thanks.”

Kaidan wanted to say, anytime, but that might not be very polite seeing that it implied he wanted the man to suffer something like this again. But in the end he couldn't come up with anything else to say, either. 

“Anytime.”

Shepard didn't let go of his hand for a long time.

\- - -

Gibbs wasn't surprised to find Tony doing extranet searches on a borrowed console while lying on one of the two beds in the tiny room they'd share for the trip. The younger man closed his screen when Gibbs entered the room, trying to make the move look casual, and for just a second Gibbs considered pretending he was buying it, to let the matter lie. To maybe make a joke about Tony surfing porn while on duty. 

But what he said, was: “Their names were Shannon and Kelly Gibbs.”

Tony started, looking at him with an almost panicked expression. Gibbs closed his own eyes to shut the sight out. 

“My wife and daughter.”

“Were they... did they...” 

Gibbs knew what Tony was asking, and pressed his hands into tight fists. “They weren't taken.” That should be enough information to sate his curiosity. And that was more than Gibbs had said aloud about his girls in over a decade. That was more than fucking plenty.

“I'm sorry,” Tony said, and maybe it was just a show of sympathy, or maybe he was apologising for his insatiable need to know, but he didn't need to be sorry, he needed to be quiet, right about now, or even better, babbling about something completely different, to draw Gibbs' thoughts away from Mindoir, away from his home, his girls, his past.

And because Tony was the best damn agent he had ever worked with, he understood all that.

“So, what do you think of the ship, huh? Isn't it eerie how quiet it is? And I'm so disappointed there are no turians on board! You'd think they'd want to keep an eye on it as well? Did I ever tell you about this one turian I used to work together with in the C-Sec once I made the Investigative branch? Garrus Vakarian? He was always complaining about the rules and regulations and I used to hush him down but now? Damn, ACIS makes C-Sec seem so damn casual, and I swear we fill in more forms than we did back then.”

Gibbs let the chatter fill his mind as he lay down on the other bed and closed his eyes. Maybe, if Tony kept that up for the next five hours (and he was perfectly capable of it, soon he'd be veering off to talk about vids he'd seen), Gibbs might not even have nightmares. Somehow the younger man's presence had come to equate safety and peace to him, which was maybe something he'd have to think about one day, but for now he was just happy to reap the benefits of it.

As Tony kept up the chatter, Gibbs' breathing evened out and, without even noticing it, he fell into dreamless sleep.


End file.
